{ "article": { "title" : "Malak Mattar: I couldn’t see colors anymore", "author" : "Malak Mattar, Céline Semaan", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/malak-mattar", "date" : "2025-09-08 10:10:59 -0400", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/malak-mattar--war-1.jpg", "excerpt" : "", "content" : "CÉLINE: Where are you now? In which part of the world?MALAK: I live in London now.CÉLINE: How was your show?MALAK: It was a group show with other artists, mostly Turkish and Lebanese. It was a really fun experience. The theme was about home and belonging.CÉLINE: I wanted to ask you, in your work, there is a palpable sense of home, of belonging. As a Palestinian artist, how do you navigate the line between your personal and the political in your paintings?MALAK: I don’t feel like there’s anything to align between the personal and the political, because everything I do, whether I like it or not, is political, but I always make sure that it reflects my own personal thoughts, my personal feelings, my family, everything in my present life…CÉLINE: Your art has traveled beyond Gaza; it’s reaching international audiences. What does it mean for you to share your art with the rest of the world, to share how it has been for you as a Palestinian person?MALAK: It feels like a beauty being postponed, and it’s like growing up. You grow up as an artist, and you’re given this title, not only as an artist, but as a voice.Every time I speak to my family back home, it’s like, what are you working on? Are you producing paintings? Can you share our struggle? Can you share what we are going through? Can you make our voices heard? When my work reaches beyond my studio, it feels like I’m doing what I can, I’m fulfilling my role as a creative.CÉLINE: Do you feel like it is your responsibility as an artist to carry the voices and the stories of your people?MALAK: Absolutely. Throughout our history, art has always reflected and documented the political struggle, starting with artists who painted the Nakba, painted their personal stories in 1948 when they were displaced. I found, while growing up in Palestine, an art scene that was blooming and expanding despite the restrictions [by the Occupation] on art materials. Artists have always been very resilient… making alternatives to paints, by using natural pigments, alternatives to canvas, by using other paper, and other materials. Every time art supplies were banned or restricted, artists came up with alternatives. Creation is urgent in the context of Palestine.CÉLINE: Where did you grow up?MALAK: In Gaza.CÉLINE: Who are the artists who have inspired you?MALAK: I was exposed to Western art in my family house: Van Gogh’s flowers, Edgar Degas’ dancers, Leonardo DaVinci… I saw these reproductions on the walls growing up. My maternal uncle, Nimit Abu Mazen, is an art professor, but he’s also a multimedia artist. He was born in the ‘50s, and he was a teacher for decades, but it’s important to mention that the United Nations commissioned him to do all the school boards in Arabic. For decades, he worked on that while also teaching. His production was very slow, but his work was very, very beautiful. It focused on women from Palestine… So I grew up in a very artistic household.CELINE: You mentioned restrictions on canvases. What other things was the Israeli occupation forbidding from entering the Gaza Strip when it comes to art materials?MALAK: I struggled to find canvases, especially after wars, and it took months, sometimes a year… At times, I actually had to smuggle canvases into Gaza… usually through expats who worked in Jerusalem. They bought canvases and brushes and came to Gaza. They were not checked by the soldiers, so they were able to bring art supplies. And that’s how I used to paint in 2021 because for months after the May attack, art supplies were not allowed entry… The art supply stores were bombed in 2021. There’s one store called Pins and Pens. It was in the very center of the city, and it was demolished. And there’s another art supply store that was also demolished. The destruction of art and culture has been going on for many, many years, not just since October.CELINE: Why do you think the Israeli occupation is afraid of art?MALAK: They’re afraid of humanization. I would say it’s not art in particular, but any act of us celebrating or painting or writing and sharing poetry is seen as a threat. When the state is built on the delusion that the Other or the Indigenous doesn’t matter, they are dehumanized. When the Indigenous are called vulgar and are labeled as terrorists, you strip away their humanity. So, any act of humanization becomes a threat because it radically changes the narrative. These people have artists, artistry, an art scene, and art centers. They celebrate theaters. They have book launches. They have music conservatories. Then, they’re not quite the terrorists that the media has portrayed them as…CELINE: In your paintings, you often use vivid colors and almost dream-like images. What role does symbolism play in your work? And what do you hope your viewers take away from these images?MALAK: I started painting in 2014 following the murder of my neighbor. She was standing in front of me, two blocks away, and she was torn into pieces. And growing up in the art environment, I was always painting, but not in a cathartic way and not on a daily basis. But since that time, I was driven by an urgency to make political art. I needed to find a way to survive and to distract myself from what I was seeing. There was destruction, there was blood, there was motherhood under bombardment. Then, I started gaining more attention and a following. This gave me a lot of hope. That my struggle was seen. That there were people who really cared. That gave me a sense of mission.My work started becoming more a celebration, more beautiful. I celebrated the sun, birds, the flowers, and the beauty of the landscape, which I had enjoyed growing up. But then, after October 7, I stopped using colors. I was like, khallas (in Arabic, primarily means “done,” “finished,” “it’s over,” or “enough,” Google AI). This was beyond my worst expectations. I departed from my older style, which was vivid and beautiful, because I just couldn’t see colors anymore. It’s such a depressing time. I’m now slowly going back to colors, but not with the same sense of joy, because I struggle to find joy when my people are being starved.CÉLINE: Yeah… what colors are you using now?MALAK: I am using mostly black and white. There is one I showed from 2021; it’s called You and I, which is like two figures embracing each other. And the rest was work I did recently. One of them is a large painting called Gaza. It’s a Phoenix with other elements.CÉLINE: What is coming for you in the next few months? Your career as an artist has been blossoming. You just illustrated the book of Francesca Albanese (an Italian legal scholar and expert on human rights who has served as the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories since May 1, 2022, Wikipedia). How did that come about? You and Francesca collaborating together, and what’s coming up for you in the next six months?MALAK: I met Francesca back in 2010. There is a chapter in her book about how we met, about my life story, and our first meeting in London. When exhibition that the school held, and Francesca was visiting. She asked me if I was selling my work. And I was like, no, they’re not for sale. I was very shy, but then a few years later, she discovered my work, and she made the connection that I was the same child she had met back in 2010, and then we met in London. We spoke, I went to her events, and we had dinners together. And, yeah, before the book came about, she said that she would love to have my work on the cover.CÉLINE: I love that for you. In the face of ongoing displacement and violence in Palestine, how do you see your work being of service… I think you touched on it in the beginning, saying that it’s the humanization. But if you can expand a little bit more on that and tell me how your work is really an instrument of the liberation.MALAK: Two million people are starving. When I think of that, it makes me feel that I’m not really doing anything, and then I’m dismissive of my work. I’m being honest. I’m just really doing my role as an artist. Yes, I’m part of the culture. But it’s hard for me to say anything when the genocide is still running, when people are really starving. I don’t feel like liberation can happen from London; I don’t think liberation happens from Paris. We’re protesting, and that’s what we should do. It’s an active protest. In this moment of our history, we are in so much pain and so much trauma…CÉLINE: I also feel like we are not doing anything or enough. Nothing feels enough. How do you feel about that?MALAK: It sucks. It’s like this feeling of helplessness. But I also don’t blame myself, because I know that it’s bigger than us.CÉLINE: Did you lose your home?MALAK: The family house: it has been flattened. My uncle’s collection, the work he collected… it has all been flattened.CÉLINE: Oh my God, I’m so sorry. How long have you been in London?MALAK: I left the day before the seventh of October.CÉLINE: Oh, my God, really? How did you manage to leave?MALAK: I was doing my Master of Fine Arts in London at Central Saint Martins. And I was supposed to leave in September, and I couldn’t; I went to the border, and they sent me back. They finally let me cross the border on the fifth of October, through Jordan, and then the sixth of October was officially my first day in London.CÉLINE: And the next day, October 7.MALAK: I saw the news, and I was like, I’ve got things to do. I’m running late to my class. But then my mom texted me. She said, the minute I left, they bombed my school. Then they started their evacuation journey. The men got separated from the women, and then they all went south. I come from the north, from Gaza City. But they all went south and stayed there for months, and then they managed to leave.CÉLINE: Now they are gone?MALAK: Yeah, they are. They left in March 2024, to Egypt for one year, and they came to London just last month. Yes, we are united. And I had to go to the court to bring them here legally, because they were not allowed entry to the UK. Their visas were rejected. So we had to fight for that family reunification." } , "relatedposts": [ { "title" : "Unpublished, Erased, Unarchived: Why Arab-Led Publishing Matters More Than Ever", "author" : "Céline Semaan", "category" : "", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/unpublished-erased-unarchived", "date" : "2025-11-13 10:25:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Cover_EIP_Unpublished.jpg", "excerpt" : "At a moment when news of Gaza, West Bank, South Lebanon, and Beirut are slowly disappearing from the headlines—and from public consciousness—Arab writers face a singular burden: We must write the stories that no one else will print. We live in a media landscape that refuses to see us as fully human. A recent analysis from Giving Compass suggests that traditional media skews Palestinian news: seven major U.S. news outlets found that Palestinian stories were 13.6% to 38.9% less likely to be individualized than Israeli ones. Meaning, Palestinians appear as abstractions—statistics, masses, “civilians”—not as people with names, losses, or lives. Meanwhile, reports from the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) show that UK outlets had a fourfold increase in coverage only when Gaza was framed through the lens of “criticism of Israel,” not Palestinian experience itself.", "content" : "At a moment when news of Gaza, West Bank, South Lebanon, and Beirut are slowly disappearing from the headlines—and from public consciousness—Arab writers face a singular burden: We must write the stories that no one else will print. We live in a media landscape that refuses to see us as fully human. A recent analysis from Giving Compass suggests that traditional media skews Palestinian news: seven major U.S. news outlets found that Palestinian stories were 13.6% to 38.9% less likely to be individualized than Israeli ones. Meaning, Palestinians appear as abstractions—statistics, masses, “civilians”—not as people with names, losses, or lives. Meanwhile, reports from the Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) show that UK outlets had a fourfold increase in coverage only when Gaza was framed through the lens of “criticism of Israel,” not Palestinian experience itself.Against this backdrop of erasure, the scarcity of Arab women’s voices in publishing is even more alarming. A bibliometric study spanning 1.7 million publications across the Middle East and North Africa shows that men publish 11% to 51% more than women. What’s more, women’s authorship is less persistent, and men reach senior authorship far faster. Arab women are not only under-published but also systematically written out of the global record.This is why Slow Factory has founded Books for Collective Liberation, an Arab-led, independent imprint committed to telling Arab stories the way they should be told: authentically, empathetically, and wholly. We publish work that would never survive the filters of legacy publishing: the political hesitation, the “market concerns,” the fear of touching Arab grief, joy, or its future. Independence is not an aesthetic choice; it is the only way to protect our stories from being softened, sanitized, or structurally erased.Our forthcoming title, On the Zero Line, created in partnership with Isolarii, is a testament to that mission. It stands on the knife’s edge where memory is threatened with extinction—a book that documents what official archives will not. It is a testimony that refuses to disappear.But books alone are not enough. Stories need a home that is alive, responsive, and politically unafraid. That is the work of Everything is Political (EIP), our independent media platform and growing archive of essays, investigations, and first-person journalism. In an era where Big Tech throttles dissenting voices and newsrooms avoid political risk, EIP protects the creative freedom of Arab writers and journalists. We publish what mainstream outlets won’t—because our lives, our histories, and our communities, dead or alive, should not depend on editorial courage elsewhere.Together, Books for Collective Liberation and Everything is Political form an ecosystem of resistance: literature and journalism that feed each other, strengthening each other, building memory as infrastructure—a new archive. We refuse the fragmentation imposed on us: that books are separate from news, that culture is separate from politics, that our narratives exist only within Western frameworks. This archive is not static; it is a living, breathing record of a people determined to write themselves into the future.When stories from Gaza, Beirut, and the broader Levant fail to make the news—or make it only as geopolitical abstractions—the result breeds distortion and public consent to eliminate us. It is a wound to historical truth. It erases whole worlds. We will not let that happen.Independent, Arab-led publishing is how we repair that wound. It is how we record what happened, in our own voice. It is how we ensure that no empire, no newsroom, and no algorithm gets to decide which of our stories survive.Tonight, we gather at Palestine House to celebrate the launch of On the Zero Line, a collection of stories, essays, and poems from Gaza, translated in English for the first time. This evening, we are centering the lived experiences of Palestinians from Gaza who have been displaced in London. I have the honor of interviewing journalist Yara Eid and Ahmed Alnaouq, project manager of the platform “We are not Just Numbers.” Here, we will discuss how mainstream literature and journalism have censored us—and how we can keep our stories alive in response." } , { "title" : "The British Museum Gala and the Deep Echoes of Colonialism", "author" : "Ana Beatriz Reitz do Valle Gameiro", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/the-british-museum-gala-and-the-deep-echoes-of-colonialism", "date" : "2025-11-11 11:59:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/the-younger-memnon-statue-british-museum%20copy.jpg", "excerpt" : "When it comes to fashion, few things are as overblown, overanalyzed, and utterly irresistible as a gala. For instance: hear the name “Met Gala”, and any fashionista’s spine will tingle while every publicist in New York breaks into a cold sweat. While New York has been hosting the original event at the Metropolitan Museum since 1948 and Paris had its Louvre moment in 2024, London finally decided to answer with an event at the British Museum on 18 October this year.", "content" : "When it comes to fashion, few things are as overblown, overanalyzed, and utterly irresistible as a gala. For instance: hear the name “Met Gala”, and any fashionista’s spine will tingle while every publicist in New York breaks into a cold sweat. While New York has been hosting the original event at the Metropolitan Museum since 1948 and Paris had its Louvre moment in 2024, London finally decided to answer with an event at the British Museum on 18 October this year.The invitation-only event drew high-profile guests such as Naomi Campbell, Mick Jagger, Edward Enninful, Janet Jackson, Alexa Chung, and James Norton. With a theme of ‘Pink Ball,’ the night drew inspiration from the vibrant colors of India and walked hand-in-hand with the museum’s ‘Ancient India: Living Traditions’ exhibition, adding a touch of colonial irony à la British tradition.Unlike its always-talked-about New York counterpart, or Paris’s star-studded affair last year that reunited figures like Doechii, Tyra Banks, Gigi Hadid, and Victoria Beckham, London’s event felt less memorable fashion-wise. With little buzz surrounding it - whether due to a less star-studded guest list, unremarkable fashion, or its clash with the Academy Museum Gala - it ultimately felt more like an ordinary night than a headline-making affair.But the event was not entirely irrelevant. In fact, it prompted reflections rarely discussed in mainstream media. Notably, because in spite of the museum’s sprawling collection of objects from other marginalized countries, the event ‘‘celebrated’’ Indian artifacts looted during colonial rule. Equally noteworthy is the institution’s partnership with BP - the British oil giant whose exports reach Israel, a state that, in the twenty-first century, stands as a symbol of colonialism and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians. And, of course, every penny raised went to the museum’s international initiatives, including an excavation project in Benin City, Nigeria, and other archaeological digs in Iraq.Although excavation is often portrayed as a means of preserving the past, archaeologists acknowledge that it is inherently destructive - albeit justifiable if it provides people with a deeper understanding of the human past. As Geoffrey Scarre discusses in Ethics of Digging, a chapter in Cultural Heritage Ethics: Between Theory and Practice, it matters who has the authority to decide what is removed from the ground, how it is treated, whether it should be retained or reburied, and who ultimately controls it. Something that feels especially relevant when discussing the objects of marginalized communities and the legacies of countries shaped by European colonialism, now just laid bare as trophies to embellish the gilded halls of Euro-American institutions.That the British Museum’s collections were built on the wealth of its nation imperialism is hardly news. Yet the institution, like so many others, from the Louvre to the Met, continues to thrive on those very foundations. As Robert J. C. Young observes in Postcolonial Remains, “the desire to pronounce postcolonial theory dead on both sides of the Atlantic suggests that its presence continues to disturb and provoke anxiety: the real problem lies in the fact that the postcolonial remains.”Although postcolonialism is often mistakenly associated with the period after a country gained independence from colonial rule, academics like Young, Edward Said, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Frantz Fanon acknowledge that our world is still a postcolonial one, with cultural, political, and economic issues reflecting the lasting effects of colonization. Its aftermath extends beyond labels like “Third World” or the lingering sense of superiority that still marks the Global North; it also fuels a persistent entitlement to our art, culture, and legacy.This entitlement can be seen in the halls of many museums worldwide. And though looting may not always be illegal - as in how these institutions acquire those objects - it is certainly unethical. For decades, scholars and activists have debated that these institutions should restitute the legacies taken from other lands, objects stolen through wars of aggression and exploitation. Still, these museums deliberately choose to hold them, artifacts that bear little cultural resonance for their current keepers, but profound meaning for the people from whom they were taken.But these debates are no longer confined to academic circles. Take Egypt, for instance. Its long-awaited Grand Museum finally opened its doors three decades after its initial proposal in 1992 and nearly twenty years since construction began in 2005. Now fully operational, breathing fresh life into Egypt’s storied past through showcasing Tutankhamun’s tomb among other relics of the country, it is demanding the return of its legacy. Egypt’s former and famously outspoken Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Dr. Zahi Hawass, for instance, recently told the BBC: “Now I want two things, number one, museums to stop buying stolen artefacts, and number two, I need three objects to come back: the Rosetta Stone from the British Museum, the Zodiac from the Louvre, and the Bust of Nefertiti from Berlin.” Beyond the direct call-out, Dr. Hawass has initiated online petitions demanding the return of the artifacts, amassing hundreds of thousands of signatures. Nevertheless, the world’s great museums remain silent, and the precious Egyptian treasures are still very much on display.With African, Asian, and Latin American legacies still held captive within Euro-American institutions, the echoes of colonialism linger well into the 21st century, keeping the postcolonial order intact. Even fashion, an industry that loves to believe it exists beyond politics, proves such. Whether through events that claim to celebrate certain things but end up being meaningless, the current Eurocentrism that still dominates the industry, or how many labels still profit from the aesthetics of marginalized nations without acknowledgment, fashion, much like museums, reproduces the very hierarchies postcolonial theory seeks to expose.Ultimately, the British Museum’s latest event does not celebrate Indian culture or Nigerian history through its excavation in Benin City. Like so many Euro-American institutions, it reinforces imperial power - masquerading cultural theft as preservation.In fashion as in museums, spectacle too often conceals empire - and beauty, unexamined, can become complicity." } , { "title" : "Mirror Mirror on the Wall: The Art That Proves How Queer Iran Once Was", "author" : "Aryana Goodarzi", "category" : "essays", "url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall", "date" : "2025-11-11 11:36:00 -0500", "img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/Amorous_Couple_V%D0%A0-1156-d509fb.jpg", "excerpt" : "During a graduate school seminar, my professor asked questions - not about my takeaways from the text or theory, but to check her own. I was almost guest lecturing the seminar with her. Some student was always reciting a reiteration of Foucault or Butler. Theory was invoked to replace thought. In the West, discourse always precedes practice. That night class, I fell into what has since become a two-year love affair with a painting - an imbrication of art, politics, and culture.\\My professor introduced me to one of my favorite pieces of art: Amorous Couple, early nineteenth century. Two androgynous figures are framed with a rich palette of oil strokes that refuses governable gender. It’s an insurgency against the taxonomies of gender, sexuality, and nation. The painting doesn’t beg for inclusion in the queer archive; it exposes the limits of the archive itself.", "content" : "During a graduate school seminar, my professor asked questions - not about my takeaways from the text or theory, but to check her own. I was almost guest lecturing the seminar with her. Some student was always reciting a reiteration of Foucault or Butler. Theory was invoked to replace thought. In the West, discourse always precedes practice. That night class, I fell into what has since become a two-year love affair with a painting - an imbrication of art, politics, and culture.\\My professor introduced me to one of my favorite pieces of art: Amorous Couple, early nineteenth century. Two androgynous figures are framed with a rich palette of oil strokes that refuses governable gender. It’s an insurgency against the taxonomies of gender, sexuality, and nation. The painting doesn’t beg for inclusion in the queer archive; it exposes the limits of the archive itself.Being proud to be Iranian is often thought to be antithetical to queer liberation – the way being a patriotic American is deemed antithetical to queer liberation today. I’ve often felt that these parts of me sit like oil and acrylic paints on a canvas – handled as an impossible pairing, even as they blend. The work – and by “work” I mean our lives – does not plead with, or seek permission from, Whiteness. Art takes us places we would otherwise not be able to access with only words.Art historian Najmabadi, once self-described as art-blind, went to the Brooklyn Museum in 1995, where she “realized doing history only with texts…had actually deprived me of an enormous resource for study, especially for issues of gender and sexuality.” I took in the painting, watching it metamorphose into a mirror. Words have never been able to paint me the way this did.Pieces like Amorous Couple (early 19th century) and A Couple Embracing are not just historical artifacts of queerness, but also a political intervention: an assertion of legitimacy within both art and politics. It takes the allegorical into documentarian. In Qajar era Iran (1789-1925), femininity and masculinity were not attached to gender or sexuality. Qajar Era Iranians didn’t need to “perform” gender in the way Judith Butler wrote about, because gender performance presupposes repeated cultural practices. Those cultural practices weren’t part of Qajar Iran because gender expression or sexual partners did not imply a rigid sexuality. Many paintings make it impossible to tell who is of which gender, or whether their relationship is heterosexual.What was freedom in Iran became a means of oppression in the West. Both Westerners and Iranians were anxious about how their culture would appear to one another. However, Western politicians misread Iranian culture through their own homophobia and influenced how sexuality in Iran is understood. As Michel Foucault might say, the concept of sexuality was not repressed - it was talked about more, politicized, and defined into homosexuality and heterosexuality. Creating these cultural categories expanded the governments reach of power. People have always had sex with the same gender. It wasn’t until the 19th century that they were called “homosexuals,” and put into that category with sociopolitical effects.\Political art simply cannot address tasks that exist entirely outside of the scope of art. Writer Maggie Nelson has said that, “Neither politics nor art is served if and when the distinctions between them are unwillingly or unthinkingly smeared out.” However, art is not apolitical - the archive of cultural production is held by branches tethered to state sponsored social engineering. Curation is an arm of control. It upholds the manufactured illusion that art and cultural institutions are liberal while ensuring compliance with capitalism and censorship. Art takes the allegorical into documentarian. It records, resists, ruptures. When it cannot influence the law, it increases literacy. When it cannot free people, it frees perception. If art cannot legislate freedom but can expand perception, then it is implicated in how freedom itself is imagined. The history of gender in Iran shows that perception is produced by cultural institutions. Najmabadi once wrote that “to be modern was to be gendered.”This production necessitated a “cultural labor” of gendering. This modernization required a labor of gendering – work that constructed and upheld the binary itself. What Najmabadi reveals is that gender was not simply “discovered” or “expressed” but produced. [Gender]queerness was actively removed from literature and the arts. Heteronormalization was also integrated through laws the state enacted. The education system also promoted binary gender through curriculum and school segregation, teaching children the “right” way to be a man or woman. This labor continues in art institutions today, where censorship begins with aesthetics, visually reinforcing the gender binary and censoring cultural institutions.Art and politics have a reciprocal dynamic: art is always one of the first cultural institutions to be censored and defunded. The change in gender aesthetic aligns with the timeline of Iran’s deepening politics with the West. Paintings, like Lovers, began to have one person topless with exposed breasts and another with facial hair. Despite wanting to reject Western influence, the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) came to depend on a concept of sexuality corresponding to that of the West more than its own. Along with the art, cultural attitudes began to change, and did so definitively with the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Just as Western influence politicized queerness in Iran, the US’s invasion of itself is rewriting the laws, culture, and curricula it once claimed as part of its freedom.In March 2025, the Trump administration issued an executive order to “Restore Truth and Sanity to American History” by banning art exhibitions involving queerness or gender identities that do not align with the administration’s gender ideology. Trump’s order reads like a decree from the Ministry of Culture – ironically, the kind of censorship the U.S. once condemned abroad. The national gender policy is also transphobic, recognizing only “male” and “female” according to another of Trump’s executive orders. The administration will also pull funding from schools with queer inclusive education.The policies have reverberated through the politicization of art and queerness. In both countries, queerness continues to come up in unquestionably national terms while contemporary politics makes queerness a national threat. There’s a quiet kind of grief that washes over you when you begin to think about the queer/trans families and adults fleeing the country – a country your family fled an authoritarian state for.Trump’s presidency is not a prior condition so much as a confirmation of what has always been. If we lived in a culture that was less homophobic and anxious about the [gender]queer experience, then queerness would be less troublesome - since part of what it’s doing is troubling the assumptions around the construction of sexuality. The US is not yet a gender apartheid, but Qajar era art functions as both witness and warning to countries that claim freedom in the name of patriotism yet repress queerness in the same terms.America is not just a country; it poses a mission: the “free” world. Many queer/trans adults and families are having to choose safety over a sentiment. To be queer in the United States is to be patriotic - because it demands the country invest in its own promise. And criminalizing queerness is not very patriotic when the basis of this country is (supposedly) the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Qajar era art paints a time when queerness was not politicized – destabilizing both the Islamic Republic’s homophobic dismissal of queer history and the West’s hold over queer identities.In both the U.S. and the Islamic Republic of Iran, censorship of queer art[ists] is justified through nationalism. The US is a museum of the “free” world, its galleries and libraries where the nation performs itself. Like Iran’s Ministry of Culture, US cultural institutions are curators and librarians, deciding what belongs on the walls and shelves. To have US laws be like that of the IRI’s makes me think of art like Amorous Couple not as subverting the IRI – that’s part of it – but as primarily revealing Islamophobia. The irony is that the Iran being called upon to address homophobia wasn’t even homophobic. Putting queer liberation in terms of only freeing them from the IRI disregards the actual cause: the US. To address the oppressive politics of transphobia and homophobia includes - no, necessitates - taking apart the Western empire. Addressing the politics of transphobia and homophobia doesn’t stop at critique - it necessitates dismantling the Western empire itself.What happens when art can hold queerness in a way that politics cannot? Does it only succeed as art – or can it enact political and cultural change? If political and cultural change cannot be attributed to the piece, is that a failure on any part of the artist or a failure of broader politics? The paintings may not answer these questions, but it pursues them, deepening possibilities. Qajar era Iran can teach the US about the role of art at a historical juncture where the construction of freedom is positioned against self-determination.There is a Western hold on queerness that once made me feel like I wasn’t as Iranian for being queer and not as queer for being Iranian.The artwork reimagined queerness not as a site of fragmentation but as a continuity – testimony to Western efforts that were never entirely successful. Many have so little concern for how an artwork has been politically, culturally, and artistically conceived that they accept art devoid of politics. When art is treated like a luxury, it’s because a culture doesn’t want it to be a tool for liberation. As show cancellations increase in the United States, uncertainty deepens about whether the supposedly liberal politics of the art world are confined to the walls of exhibitions.Ultimately, Amorous Couple confirms that art is not merely archival - it is a political intervention beyond the reach of culture and law." } ] }